Horses, Not Zebras

[A morality play in three parts.]

This evening after I finished my run, I was waiting for an elevator in the lobby of our building. A South Asian man - probably Indian, maybe Pakistani - was waiting as well, but when the elevator arrived and I charged in, he quite deliberately did not follow.

Chagrined that someone had deemed me an unsuitable elevator companion, here is what went through my head…

I. First, I felt guilty: “Oh no - he was a laborer and he didn’t want to overstep his bounds by riding in the elevator with me!” It’s a sadly commonplace occurrence in this part of the world that when a white person or a local is in an elevator, “laborers” (basically a catch-all term for low-income South Asian workers) will stand back and wait for the next one. I don’t know the cause for this self-initiated apartheid - deference? colonialism? the caste system? - but it’s “normal” (finger-quotes) enough that this was the first explanation that popped into my head. But this guy hadn’t seemed like a laborer…

II. Then, I felt annoyed: “Ugh - he was an uber conservative Muslim and he didn’t want to be in such close proximity to an infidel harlot like me!” This practice used to drive me crazy when I worked in Saudi Arabia, and has happened a couple of times in Dubai… basically, super-strict Muslim men won’t share the elevator with women (and vice versa) because it’s haram - forbidden - to be in a private space with a member of the opposite sex who’s not in your immediate family. But had this guy even been Muslim?

III. Finally, I looked at myself in the mirrored walls of the elevator - drenched in sweat and gasping for breath, with Jay-Z and Linkin Park audibly screaming “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” from my iPod - and felt stupid: “Um, hi - maybe he just didn’t want to share a forty-floor elevator ride with the sweaty, smelly girl blasting shitty hip hop and wheezing like she’s about to hack up a lung?”

And that, my friends, is why the obvious answer is sometimes the best one. As my high school biology teacher used to say: “When you hear hoofbeats - think horses, not zebras.”

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jacquesofalltrades said: Alternatively, he may have been waiting for the down elevator, while you got onto the up one.
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